Thailand’s PAO Elections: What Did Not Happen

Sometimes, what does not happen can be very important. The Provincial Administrative Organization (PAO) elections held across Thailand on 1 February were a case in point. Despite considerable hype about a major political breakthrough for the Progressive People’s Party, they won just one PAO presidency in the small Northern province of Lamphun. At different junctures over the previous few months, People’s Party leaders and sympathetic commentators had expressed optimism about their chances of victory in a range of other provinces, including Udon Thani, Chiang Mai, Nakhon Nayok, Phuket, Surat Thani and Trat. But in the end, the country’s traditional elite had every incentive to try and limit the party’s successes.

Why did this matter? The People’s Party is the third parliamentary incarnation of a progressive political movement, popularly referred to as the ‘orange’ movement, launched in 2018 by wealthy businessman Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit. Its precursors, the Future Forward and Move Forward Parties, performed extremely well in the 2019 and 2023 elections respectively, but were then dissolved by the Constitutional Court on grounds that many found tendentious. In 2023, the People’s Party gained support from key sectors of society by rejecting the conservative consensus and advocating the wholesale transformation of the country’s social and political structures. However, despite its immense popularity, especially with younger voters, the party has yet to secure the reins of power. It is also vulnerable to the charge that it has become a talking-shop for discontents, rather than a genuine engine of change.

Following Future Forward’s dissolution in 2020, Thanathorn turned his sights to winning control of some PAOs, in order to demonstrate his movement’s ability to administer a province and bring tangible benefits to the electorate. Former premier Thaksin Shinawatra had goaded the party during the PAO campaign, declaring “They [People’s Party MPs in Chiang Mai] are all talk. They cannot only talk but must work. It’s better to choose the party that can do things”. In December 2020, Move Forward fielded PAO presidential candidates in more than 30 provinces, but failed to win a single one. To be fair, the orange side had limited time to prepare in 2020, and campaigning was severely curtailed by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. 2025 was supposed to be different: the People’s Party had several years to select the best possible candidates and strategise optimal routes to victory. They fielded candidates in just 17 provinces, maximising their efforts in the most winnable seats rather than spreading resources too thinly.

… the dimming of Thanathorn’s hopes to gain a strong foothold at the PAO level in 2025 testifies to a new determination by the country’s conservative elite and the current ruling coalition to thwart the People’s Party.

But even before the February polls opened, there were warning signs for the orange party. The first came when former Move Forward MP Padipat Suntiphada was forced from office in August 2024, triggering a by-election in his Phitsanulok constituency. The People’s Party lost the seat by almost 7,000 votes to Pheu Thai, following a coordinated move by three members of the ruling coalition — Pheu Thai, Bhumjaithai and Palang Pracharat — to block the party’s new candidate from winning. Theoretically, Thailand has a notional multi-party system. In practice, however, the People’s Party has evolved into a de facto one-party opposition that is being thwarted at every turn by the remaining large parties acting in concert. In 2023, the larger parties had thwarted Move Forward from forming a government.

Move Forward had won 112 constituency seats in the 2023 election. Yet parliamentary districts did not readily translate into PAO presidencies. For general elections, voters who are working away from their notional home areas are allowed to cast their votes in advance in polling places other than the one where they were formally registered to vote. The orange parties were big beneficiaries of advance voting, since many of those working away in urban areas such as greater Bangkok were younger voters who sympathised with the party’s pro-change messaging. Voters working from home are estimated to constitute up to 20 per cent of the electorate.

In PAO elections, there is no advance voting; to compound matters, the Election Commission took an unprecedented decision to hold these elections on a Saturday, instead of the usual Sunday. The net result was that working-age voters were less likely to go to the polls, and those living away from their home areas had less time to return for the PAO elections – as seen in the very low turnout of 58.45 per cent, compared with 62.86 in 2020. While the Election Commission justified this change on technical and legal grounds, many observers suspected that the conservative elite was really hoping to undermine the voter base of the People’s Party.

PAO elections are fundamentally different from national elections. Local patronage networks and political dynasties — popularly referred to as ‘big houses’, or ban yai — play central roles in provincial electoral dynamics, and so they cannot always be read accurately through the lens of parliamentary party rivalries. Nevertheless, the dimming of Thanathorn’s hopes to gain a strong foothold at the PAO level in 2025 testifies to a new determination by the country’s conservative elite and the current ruling coalition to thwart the People’s Party. On 1 February, politicians who have long disliked and mistrusted one another came together in the face of a common enemy in many provinces, rallying around a single candidate to make it much harder for the People’s Party to win. If this alliance remains firm at the end time of the next general election — which must be held by 2027 — it will pose very serious challenges to the party that gained the largest number of parliamentary seats in 2023.

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